Alelo CEO Lewis Johnson said, “Alelo is pleased and honored to be included in the Outsell 250, and considered for the list of 30 to Watch. We believe it recognizes Alelo’s innovative learning method, as well as our Enskill platform that is providing making this method available to students around the world.”

The International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS) has selected a paper co-authored by Dr. Lewis Johnson of Alelo Inc., Prof. James Lester of North Carolina State University and the late Dr. Jeff Rickel of the University of Southern California to receive the 2017 Influential Paper Award. Entitled “Animated pedagogical agents: Face-to-face interaction in interactive learning environments,” the paper published in the year 2000 laid the groundwork for a wide range of educational products that incorporate animated agent technology.

Alelo has been selected for Military Training Technology’s 2016 Top Simulation & Training Companies list. Companies featured on the list for 2016 are from around the world and have made significant impacts on the military training and simulation industries across a vast array of technologies. These companies’ products allow U.S. airmen, Marines, sailors, soldiers and Coast Guardsmen to train and rehearse for missions in theater, or to prepare for deployment at home station. Each year the number of submissions has grown and it has become increasingly difficult for companies to make the list.

Alelo announced today its Enskill Digital Learning Environment, a system designed to deliver highly effective, economic learning solutions to close the skills gap faced by today’s workers who need both technical and interpersonal skills to thrive while automation increasingly eliminates routine jobs.

Alelo Inc. (Los Angeles) and Laureate International Universities (Baltimore) have signed an agreement to co-develop computer-based modules for learning and assessing spoken English skills based on Alelo’s virtual role-play technology and methods. The modules will be initially integrated into Laureate’s online English-learning courses offered to its 50,000 lower-level students in Latin America.

The U.S. Air Force recently recognized Alelo’s Virtual Cultural Awareness Trainers (VCATs) as a success story funded by its Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) program, and produced a video showcasing the success. The SBIR program is a highly competitive program that encourages domestic small businesses to engage in Federal research and development that has the potential for commercialization.

When I was in graduate school, plenty of people asked me the dreaded question every anthropology student hears: “What are you going to do with that?” The question is a good one. In 2012 Forbes ranked anthropology as the worst college major for getting a well-paying job. In 2011, Florida governor Rick Scott called cited anthropology as one of the more useless college majors, encouraging college students to go into STEM fields. In fact, his words were: “Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists? I don’t think so.”

The Office of the Secretary of Defense funded Alelo and Aptima to develop ALLEARN, an adaptive learning architecture that helps people learn foreign languages more rapidly and develop higher levels of proficiency. ALLEARN exploits advances in artificial intelligence to create rich interactive learning experiences that are optimized for each learner. Below is our interview with Dr. W. Lewis Johnson, President and CEO of Alelo.

Recognizing the unmet need for effective, relatively inexpensive foreign-language learning, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) has awarded a $3 million contract to Aptima Inc. and Alelo Inc. to develop ALLEARN, a system to accelerate foreign-language learning using artificial intelligence technologies.